As part of work on a new Housing development in Heaton there are plans to add a short section of protected cycle lane to Hartford Street off Chillingham Road. This would link an existing cycle crossing on Chillingham Road to a new route through the new Heaton Quarter development, meaning the new development will be linked to the city centre via a route on filtered street or protected cycle lanes.

Once the development is finished there should be a new route from Hartford Street through to Marleen Avenue too.

We sent the following response to the council:

Newcastle Cycling Campaign welcomes the plans for improvement to Hartford Street.

We would like to make sure that it will be easy to join and leave the new cycleway from Spencer Street as many people use that route currently.

This street has suffered from anti-social parking for decades. The plans for the cycle way note that defender bollards will be used, which is good. We’d just like to ensure that there won’t be space between the bollards to fit a car.

There are often vehicles parked on the current buildout that allows access from the road on to the crossing of Chillingham Road. The new cycle way obviously links to the same crossing, so we’d like to ensure that this section will also receive protection to prevent this from happening in future.

This is an opportunity to build a useful bit of cycling infrastructure, but it will only be useful if the anti-social parking issues are addressed.